ExamineHealth

A lot of us manage our work via email. Knowledge workers, as they've been come to be known, often live and die by email. This is where the work comes in, and this is where the work gets delivered when it's finished. Outlook can become this huge dashboard portal for your entire work life. It can schedule your appointments, track your to-do list, store reference documents, manage incoming requests, and send out the resulting deliverables. So it makes sense to learn to optimize your email system the best way possible.

Lots of people get overwhelmed by the amount of email that they get. The inbox can become overrun with items that aren't relevant, need to be filed, need to be done, or need to be deleted. Once this happens, it can be difficult to crawl out of the hole and get back to a homeostasis that you can feel comfortable with.

There are a lot of email management systems out there, some simple, and some complex. A lot of them can be very good once you get them all set up (which can be daunting in the first place), and if you rigorously stick to them (which can be as stressful as having an unmanaged inbox).

In this article, I'm not going to try to provide you with a complete email management system, that would take much longer than the scope of this single article. However, I can provide you with my single favorite tip, the method that I provide to anyone who expresses email frustrations to me. I think you'll find that it will make a huge difference in your email management, as well as your general productivity and accountability.